Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Great Jurists of the World
All history, said the lamented master Maitland, in a memo rable epigram, is but a seamless web; and he who endeavors to tell but a piece of it must feel that his first sentence tears the fabric.
This seamless web of our own legal history unites us inseparably to the history of Western and Southern Europe. Our main interest must naturally center on deciphering the pattern which lies directly before us, that of the anglo-american law. But in tracing the warp and woof of its structure we are brought inevi tably into a larger field of Vision. The story of Western Continental Law is made up, in the last analysis, of two great movements, racial and intellectual. One is the Germanic migrations, planting a solid growth of Germanic custom everywhere, from Danzig to Sicily, from London to Vienna. The other is the posthumous power' of Roman law, forever resisting, struggling, and coalescing with the other. A thousand detailed combinations, of varied types, are developed, and a dozen distinct systems now survive in independence. But the result is that no one of them can be fully understood without surveying and tracing the whole.
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